Information can have great value. Assembling and maintaining a database to store information involves real costs. The costs can include the costs to acquire the information, the costs associated with the physical assets used to house, secure, and make the information available, and/or the labor costs to manage the information.
Some of the value of certain information may be derived from the fact that the information is not widely known (e.g., not shared). For example, a list of suppliers, their products and pricing, or a customer list, may be valuable to a manufacturing entity, which likely would not be inclined to share such information with its competitors. Conversely, some of the value of other information may be derived from the fact that the information is widely known (e.g., shared). For example, a library catalog is information that can be valuable to a community of users by being widely available, thereby saving time, effort, and perhaps money in trying to locate a particular item in a collection of items.
Some competitive information that principally derives value from not being widely known (e.g., among competitors and/or customers) may derive additional value were it shared with other entities in a limited manner. One such example is information related to a supply chain. A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. A service can include a wholly electronic workflow, in which case “fulfillment” is the completion of a specific set of possibly entirely-electronic tasks, with the appropriate temporal ordering. A supply chain may be a combination of products and services. For example, services that monitor and provide local control over electricity usage by customers may help to control the generation and supply of electricity to customers. Relationships of participants in a supply chain may include supplier-customer, and/or competitors, among others. Regulators and/or consumers may also have an interest in information concerning a particular supply chain. For example, information regarding the supply chain of a food product may be of interest to regulators and/or consumers.
It may be beneficial to share information on a limited basis to demonstrate that a certain component is not involved, or otherwise trace items and/or processes involved in the supply chain. It may be desirable to share information on a limited basis for studies that might benefit multiple supply chain entities and/or the consumers, or to prove or disprove some fact to regulators. Increased traceability can also limit the potentially huge economic and safety consequences of counterfeiting and defective products. For example, food and/or brand name piracy concerns can cost the industry billions of dollars each year, and can cause the industry to implement anti-counterfeit technologies to protect products, brand and/or market. Recall is also a critical service where remedial activities are to be applied to a defective product or component thereof, making it desirable to identify locations of affected product. Increased traceability along a supply chain can increase trust and limit the consequences of events closer to their source in the supply chain.
Enhanced supply chain robustness improves customer experience by delivering products reliably and decreasing the costs and manual effort associated with debugging and fixing errors in the delivery of products and services. Supply chain participants are motivated to improve robustness but need improved mechanisms to efficiently manage the sharing of information. Collaborative information systems can include large amounts of dynamic data, such as concerning transactional information of products and/or services of a supply chain. Applying appropriate data retention policies to data sources that may be geographically and organizationally diverse, subject to multiple legal requirements, and can be maintained over long periods of time as data-related considerations change, can be challenging.